Today's Web is a great, big, glorious mess. Spiders, robots, screen-scraping, and plain text searches are standard practices that indicate a desperate attempt to draw arbitrary distinctions between needles and hay. And they go only so far as the data we've taken the trouble to make available online.

Now peer-to-peer promises to turn your desktop, laptop, palmtop, and fridge into peers, chattering away with one another and making swaths of their data stores available online. Of course, if every single device on the network exposes even a small percentage of the resources it manages, it will exacerbate the problem by piling on more hay and needles in heaps. How will we cope with the sudden logarithmic influx of disparate data sources?

The new protocols being developed at breakneck speed for peer-to-peer applications also add to the mess by disconnecting data from the fairly bounded arena of the Web and the ubiquitous port 80. Loosening the hyperlinks that bind all these various resources together threatens to scatter hay and needles to the winds. Where previously we had application user interfaces for each and every information system, the Web gave us a single user interface -- the browser -- along with an organizing principle -- the hyperlink -- that allowed us to reach all the material, at least in theory. Peer-to-peer might undo all this good and throw us back into the dark ages of one application for each application type or application service. We already have Napster for MP3s and work has begun on Docster for documents -- can JPEGster and Palmster be very far off?

And how shall we search these disparate, transitory clumps of data, winking in and out of existence as our devices go on and offline, to say nothing of finding the clumps in the first place? Napster is held up as a reassurance that everything can work out on its own. The inherent ubiquity of any one MP3 track gets around the problem of resource transience. However, isn't this abundance simply the direct result of its rather constrained problem space? MP3 files are popular, and MP3 rippers make it easy for huge numbers of people to create decent-quality files.

As industry attention turns to peer-to-peer technologies, and as the content within these systems becomes more heterogeneous, the technology will have to accommodate content that is harder to accumulate and less popular; the critical mass of replicated files will not be attained. Familiar problems associated with finding a particular item may reemerge, this time in a decentralized environment rather than around the familiar Web hub.

Whether or not peer-to-peer fares any better than the Web, it certainly presents a new challenge for people concerned with describing and classifying information resources. Peer-to-peer provides a rich environment and a promising early stage for putting in place all we've learned about metadata over the past decade.

So, before we go much further, what exactly is metadata?

Data about data

Metadata is the stuff of card catalogues, television guides, Rolodexes, taxonomies, tables of contents -- to borrow a Zen concept, the finger pointing at the moon. It is labels like "title," "author," "type," "height," and "language" used to describe a book, person, television program, species, etc. Metadata is, quite simply, data about data.

There are communities of specialists who have spent years working on -- and indeed solving some of -- the hard problems of categorizing, cataloguing, and making it possible to find things. Even in the early days of the Web, developers enlisted the help of these information scientists and architects, realizing that otherwise we'd be in for quite a mess. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DMCI) [1] is just such an effort. An interdisciplinary, international group founded in 1994, the DCMI's charter is to use a minimal set of metadata constructs to make it easier to find things on the Web. We'll take a closer look at Dublin Core in a moment.

Yet, while well-understood systems exist for cataloguing and classifying some classic types of information, such as books (e.g., MARC records and the Dewey Decimal System), equivalent facilities were late to arrive on the Web -- some would say far too late. They are emerging, however, just in time for peer-to-peer.

Metadata lessons from the Web

Peer-to-peer's power lies in its willingness to rethink old assumptions and reinvent the way we do things. This can be quite constructive, even revolutionary, but it also risks being hugely destructive in that we can throw out lessons previously learned from the Web experience. In particular, we know that the Web suffered because metadata infrastructure was added relatively late (1997+), an add-on situation that had an impact on various levels.

The Web burst onto the scene before we managed to agree on common descriptive practices -- ways of describing "stuff." Consequently, the vast majority of web-related tools lack any common infrastructure for specifying or using the properties of web content. WYSIWYG HTML editors don't go out of their way to make their metadata support (if they have any) visible, nor do they request metadata for a document when authors press the "Save" button. Search engines provide little room for registering metadata along with their associated sites. Robots and spiders often discard any metadata in the form of HTML <meta> tags they might find. This has resulted in an enormous hodgepodge of a data set with little rhyme or reason. The Web is hardly the intricately organized masterpiece represented by its namesake in nature.

Early peer-to-peer applications come from relatively limited spheres (MP3 file-sharing, messaging, Weblogs, groupware, etc.) with pretty well understood semantics and implicit metadata -- we know it's an MP3 because it's in Napster. These communities have the opportunity, before heterogeneity and ubiquity muddy the waters, to describe and codify their semantics to allow for better organization, extraction, and search functionality down the road. Yet even at this early stage, we're already seeing the same mistakes creeping in.

Richard Koman's WeblogSupreme Court Decides Unanimously Against Grokster
Updating as we go. Supremes have ruled 9-0 in favor of the studios in MGM v Grokster. But does the decision have wider import? Is it a death knell for tech? It's starting to look like the answer is no.
(Jun 27, 2005)